Turning the Page

I can't say for sure that it's the end of the book, but I know that I've started a new chapter in the past couple of weeks. I'm still struggling to make sense of the plot twists, and maybe I'm reading too much between the lines trying to find things that weren't ever there.

I've always been the kind of person who does best when I take time to think before I speak, which doesn't always happen. I've certainly had my fair share of times when I've hurt people -- and been hurt -- by speaking too quickly or saying too much. I've learned that sometimes you shouldn't ask the question unless you're prepared for an answer that you don't want to hear. But I've also realized that you don't get any answers to the questions that you don't ask. No amount of chasing them around inside your head is ever going to resolve them with the certainty that you need to finally put a period at the end of the sentence.

Even if everything in life really does happen for a reason, in the long run, the reasons aren't what matters. Once you've made your peace with where you are, you stop thinking about how you got there and wondering what you could have done to get to somewhere different. It's a great feeling when you have it, but once you get it, you can't let yourself look back. The moment you do, you're trying to connect the dots and make sense of the past again. You get so caught up in the "why?" that you forget to concentrate on the only question that you can really answer: "what am I going to do about it?" It's not about what you should have done; even if you did make a mistake, you're still too close to learn from it. Picking it apart just prolongs the healing process. Until you can put it down and walk away, it's just baggage that you're carrying.

Nothing in the world scares me so much as a blank page. Given that I write for a living, that's probably a bad thing. I always need something to start from, even if nothing that's there at the beginning ends up in the final product. There's always a conflict between wanting to look back and needing to move forward, especially when you're not quite sure which is which. I know that eventually I'll get to a place where the difference becomes clear. I'm just not sure if it will be another new chapter, or the end of the story once and for all.